Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU), University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Cogn Psychol. 2012 Jun;64(4):267-91. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.01.002. Epub 2012 Feb 16.
There is now considerable evidence showing that the time to read a word out loud is influenced by an interaction between orthographic length and lexicality. Given that length effects are interpreted by advocates of dual-route models as evidence of serial processing this would seem to pose a serious challenge to models of single word reading which postulate a common parallel processing mechanism for reading both words and nonwords (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Rastle, Havelka, Wydell, Coltheart, & Besner, 2009). However, an alternative explanation of these data is that visual processes outside the scope of existing parallel models are responsible for generating the word-length related phenomena (Seidenberg & Plaut, 1998). Here we demonstrate that a parallel model of single word reading can account for the differential word-length effects found in the naming latencies of words and nonwords, provided that it includes a mapping from visual to orthographic representations, and that the nature of those orthographic representations are not preconstrained. The model can also simulate other supposedly "serial" effects. The overall findings were consistent with the view that visual processing contributes substantially to the word-length effects in normal reading and provided evidence to support the single-route theory which assumes words and nonwords are processed in parallel by a common mechanism.
现在有相当多的证据表明，大声朗读一个单词的时间受到正字法长度和词汇性之间相互作用的影响。鉴于双通路模型的支持者将长度效应解释为序列处理的证据，这似乎对单个单词阅读模型构成了严重挑战，这些模型假设阅读单词和非单词都有一个共同的平行处理机制（Coltheart、Rastle、Perry、Langdon 和 Ziegler，2001；Rastle、Havelka、Wydell、Coltheart 和 Besner，2009）。然而，对这些数据的另一种解释是，现有平行模型之外的视觉过程负责产生与单词长度相关的现象（Seidenberg 和 Plaut，1998）。在这里，我们证明，只要一个单词阅读的平行模型包括从视觉到正字法表示的映射，并且这些正字法表示的性质不受预先限制，那么它就可以解释单词和非单词命名潜伏期中发现的不同单词长度效应。该模型还可以模拟其他所谓的“序列”效应。总体发现与视觉处理对正常阅读中单词长度效应有很大贡献的观点一致，并为支持单一路径理论提供了证据，该理论假设单词和非单词通过共同机制并行处理。
